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Understanding and debugging Splink

Splink contains tooling to help developers understand the underlying computations, how caching and pipelining is working, and debug problems.

There are two main mechanisms: _debug_mode, and setting different logging levels

Debug mode

You can turn on debug mode by setting linker._debug_mode = True.

This has the following effects:

  • Each step of Splink's calculations are executed in turn. That is, pipelining is switched off.
  • The SQL statements being executed by Splink are displayed
  • The results of the SQL statements are displayed in tabular format

This is probably the best way to understand each step of the calculations being performed by Splink - because a lot of the implementation gets 'hidden' within pipelines for performance reasons.

Note that enabling debug mode will dramatically reduce Splink's performance!

Logging

Splink has a range of logging modes that output information about what Splink is doing at different levels of verbosity.

Unlike debug mode, logging doesn't affect the performance of Splink.

Logging levels

You can set the logging level with code like logging.getLogger("splink").setLevel(desired_level) although see notes below about gotchas.

The logging levels in Splink are:

  • logging.INFO (20): This outputs user facing messages about the training status of Splink models
  • 15: Outputs additional information about time taken and parameter estimation
  • logging.DEBUG (10): Outputs information about the names of the SQL statements executed
  • logging.DEBUG (7): Outputs information about the names of the components of the SQL pipelines
  • logging.DEBUG (5): Outputs the SQL statements themselves

How to control logging

Note that by default Splink sets the logging level to INFO on initialisation

With basic logging

import logging
linker = Linker(df, settings, db_api, set_up_basic_logging=False)

# This must come AFTER the linker is intialised, because the logging level
# will be set to INFO
logging.getLogger("splink").setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

Without basic logging

# This code can be anywhere since set_up_basic_logging is False
import logging
logging.basicConfig(format="%(message)s")
splink_logger = logging.getLogger("splink")
splink_logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

linker = Linker(df, settings, db_api, set_up_basic_logging=False)